love and intimacy is the cause of all our happiness and sorrow; our well-being and sickness, and of all our pain and healing. To give up one is to give up the other. If you deny yourself love for fear of the pain, you would undoubtedly be depriving yourself of all the ecstasies too. Surely the high that love alone can swing you to is worth the risk of pain?
   And then, there is a beauty to even the pain that love brings. Its beauty lies in the depth of emotion we experience and to the way we respond to it. Some of our most beautiful poetry, songs and art have been the result of emotional turmoil resulting from rejection in love. In fact many creative artists work on perfecting the art of wallowing in melancholy. The world’s greatest love stories have ended in pain and separation. Does that stop us from idolising Romeo & Juliet, Tristan & Isolde, Heer Ranjha or Paro Devdas?
   There are those who say that love never ends. Two individuals may choose to end a relationship, yet if they truly loved each other, the love lasts beyond their togetherness. It is an emotion that you can revisit and wrap around yourself as a comfort in times of loneliness and despair. Love imbues two individuals with a sense of wellbeing, happiness and confidence that rest of the world cannot penetrate. And when they separate, why must they also give up all the positive strokes love brought them?
   Whether or not you are able to smile at shared happy moments later and retain the positive feelings really depends on the way two individuals choose to end their relationship.
   Dr Brian Weiss in Only Love is Real, the book Princess Diana read just before she took off on her last holiday with Dodi, explains that love is a powerful, reuniting energy. If you believe in love as the be-all and end-all of our existence; as both the beginning as well as conclusion of the journey of life, you would agree that we need to go through any number of relationships in life because we learn our life’s lessons through them — “forgiveness, understanding, patience, awareness, non-violence…We have to unlearn other traits, such as f e a r … a n ge r … . g r e e d … h at r e d … pride… ego which result from old conditioning.’
   If that’s so, then the very purpose of the beginning and ending of a relationship must be to enable us to learn valuable lessons. And, if we don’t understand that, we would be doomed to a series of loves that keep ending in grief!
   Love sharpens our senses and mental faculties. It increases our capacity for giving as well as receiving emotion. Love brings with it enlightenment and a lightness of being. And when love creeps away, it leaves us with a depth of emotion that is just as meaningful and necessary to our existence, to the very fabric of our lives…
   I hold it true, whate’er befall;
   I feel it, when I sorrow most;
   ‘Tis better to have loved and lost
   Than never to have loved at all.
   — Lord Tennyson

 by       : vinita dawra nangia

source : timeslife.